If anyone wants to avoid all the agro here you're welcome over on Oz
Hi-Fi & HT :-
http://forum.aushifi.com /
.........a moderated forum that allows the posting of graphics,
circuit
diagrams etc and avoids that flame wars that are destroying so many
newsgroups.

If anyone wants to avoid all the agro here you're welcome over on Oz
Hi-Fi & HT :-
http://forum.aushifi.com /
........................a moderated forum that allows the posting of
graphics, circuit
diagrams etc and avoids that flame wars that are destroying so many
newsgroups.

http://www.smh.com.au/news/world/internet-slanging-match-ends-up-in-high-court/2006/03/23/1143083906475.html
Internet slanging match ends up in High Court
A political argument that erupted in a remote corner of
cyberspace and
descended into vicious name-calling could lead to a spate of
libel
actions by contributors to internet message boards.

The dark side of the blogosphere was revealed by a libel
action brought
by Michael Keith-Smith, a former Conservative Party member
who stood
for the United Kingdom Independence Party in Portsmouth
North, on the
south coast of England, at the last election.

He said he was moved to sue after a woman with whom he was
debating the
merits of military action in Iraq began a campaign of
name-calling that
started by describing him as "lard brain" and culminated in
labelling
him a "Nazi", a "racist bigot" and a "nonce".

Judge Alistair MacDuff in the High Court ordered Tracy
Williams, a
college lecturer from Oldham, in north-west England, to pay
£10,000
($24,000) in damages, plus Mr Keith-Smith's £7200 costs, and
told
never to repeat the allegations.

The case is one of the first of its kind between two private
individuals to go to court, said lawyers. It highlighted
issues that
would become more prominent as internet use continued to
grow and
blogging, social networking and community sites became yet
more
popular, they said.

Mr Keith-Smith said he took action after a debate about the
Iraq war in
2003 on a Yahoo! message board with about 100 members turned
ugly.

"She was very pro-[US President George] Bush. Initially, she
called me
lard brain and I wasn't particularly concerned about that.
Then she
called me a Nazi," he said.

He has also taken action against a second poster, he said,
with whom he
claimed to have settled for a sum "in the region of
£30,000".

"They started saying I was on a sex offenders' list and that
people
shouldn't let me near their children," said Mr Keith-Smith,
who is also
chairman of the Conservative Democratic Alliance, which
bills itself as
"the leading voice of the radical Tory right".

Legal experts said the case should be taken as a warning to
the
millions of people debating contentious issues on message
boards, in
chatrooms and on their own blogs.

The Guardian

Oh how all of this sounds sooooo familiar ;-) I wonder if
this judge could be tempted to take a working holiday to Oz?
;-)

"The dark side of the blogosphere was revealed by a libel action brought by
Michael Keith-Smith, a former Conservative party member who stood for Ukip
in Portsmouth North at the last election. He said he was moved to sue after
a woman with whom he was debating the merits of military action in Iraq
began a campaign of name-calling that started by describing him as "lard
brain" and culminated in falsely labelling him a "Nazi", a "racist bigot"
and a "nonce"."

you'd think a towering intellect like Phil would realise that this is a
globally distributed public forum, and that anything libelous he writes
is likely to exist, if not forever then at least for a very long time.
eventually he's going to annoy someone who is happy to waste a bit of
money on lawyers

Just to put things in perspective, consider that the trial of Slobodan
Milosevic, the Balkan butcher, had been going for more than 4 years at
a cost to taxpayers of several hundreds of millions of dollars before
he put a merciful end to the legal gravy train by topping himself. In
that same amount of time the world managed to start and finish a World
War, and I completed an engineering degree.